Notes:

Physical System Notes

Firmware settings used:

Platform Controlled Type = Maximum Performance

Storage Notes

All storage accessed with 2 x 4 Gb Fibre Channel links. Each of the 4 DS3400 units houses 12 73-GB SAS drives and connects (daisy chained) to 3 EXP3000 SAS enclosures. Each EXP3000 enclosure houses 12 73-GB SAS drives. Total SAS drive count is 192. There are 24 SAS RAID5 arrays, each consisting of 8 drives. For all arrays, each one has one LUN defined for one Tile. On the first array, there is a second LUN defined for hypervisor boot disk. Each LUN that is defined for a Tile is divided in to 6 disk partitions which are used for the 6 VM types in a tile.

Client Driver Notes

All prime clients are VMs hosted with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1. The first 3 physical client systems host up to 8 prime client VMs. The fourth physical client system hosts the prime controller VM. Each prime client VM has 2 vCPUs, 3 GB memory, and a 20 GB disk, and the prime controller VM has 2 vCPUs, 2.75 GB memory, and a 40 GB disk. Paravirtual clock is used for all client VMs. 1 virtio_net device and 1 virtio_blk device are used in all client VMs. On all physical clients, first Ethernet port is used for host access and NFS. The remaining 3 active ports are used for software bridges, up to 3 VMs per bridge. Client VM images are provided from an NFS server.

All physical client systems and virtual clients have the following lines added to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh2 = 8192

net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_thresh3 = 8192

net.ipv4.neigh.default.base_reachable_time = 86400

net.ipv4.neigh.default.gc_stale_time = 86400

net.ipv6.neigh.default.gc_thresh1 = 4096

net.ipv6.neigh.default.gc_thresh2 = 8192

net.ipv6.neigh.default.gc_thresh3 = 8192

net.ipv6.neigh.default.base_reachable_time = 86400

net.ipv6.neigh.default.gc_stale_time = 86400

Other Notes

One Blade Network Technologies G8052 switch is equipped with 2 x SFP+ 10GBase-SR transceivers and are used for all physical network connections. One QLogic 5600 FC switch is used for all fibre channel access.

For questions about this result, please contact the submitter: IBM Corporation